News From The World of Saints

If you take the set of all Australians and put the criminals and Irishmen over here, the remainder over there is your first Australian saint, Mary McKillop ("Mother" to her confederates).

It's noted in the news that during the course of a lifetime of good behavior Mother Mary of the Cross ("Mama Marie Delacroix" as the francophone would have it) was excommunicated briefly by a bishop for insubordination. I wasn't aware that the power of excommunication had devolved to mere bishops. I always thought only the pope or his designated staff could strike people officially from the rolls of the organization, but that may be due to my admittedly insufficient attention to what I'm sure are the condign rulings of the Church on the matter. Perhaps any altar boy has the authority when going about his appointed rounds.

I remember the story of the ex-seminarian who pressed the Vatican for an official certificate of excommunication, which he recieved in due course from whatever tribunal handles those matters back there on the home acres of the Roman Catholic Church, although not without a measure of bother on his part. It turns out that perhaps all along he could have just chosen one of the local platoon of bishops in the San Francisco Bay Area to get the job done with authority. Even those who've sidled away from the Church without engaging in the formalities observed by the ex-seminarian will appreciate, however, the coolness factor of having a writ directly from the pope's own penmen recognizing the sundered tie.

In the case of Mary McKillop the bishop apparently retracted his act of excommunication shortly after he issued it, retroactively nullifying its effect. Thus, after three days or so, Mary McKillip rose from those listed as dead to the Church,  it being revealed to all that she had only seemed to be gone during that time, when in fact she had been present  continuously in substance and spirit within the folds of Holy Mother the Church the whole while.

Pitchers and Catchers Report Today!

Pinnipeds Spending More Time With Their Families, Study Shows

Rick, Lost, January 2009

A year gone now, looking back at that terrible news.

Rick had six months to live when I took this photo of him in June of 2008.

The Truth Untold vs. the Told Untruth

"I had myself been prime minister in the first Gulf war and I knew when I said something I was utterly certain that it was correct, and I said less than I knew," he said.

"I assumed the same thing had happened and on that basis I supported reluctantly the second Iraq war."

— John Major, former British Prime Minister, quoted in the Guardian, Jan 2, 2010

Mr. Major suggests that you wouldn't have found all the facts from what he was willing to let on in public at the time of the first gulf war. Being politic, he reserved some facts from what he was saying. Mr. Blair, contrarily, publicly suggested what couldn't be found in the facts at all.

Mr. Major suggests that he had a lot of verified information, not all of which he divulged in public, when he spoke as Prime Minister during the Gulf War. This is a testable proposition. A skim through the archives would quickly establish how much of the information claimed as verified by Mr. Major was actually verifiable in the event, and alternately, how much of it remains on inspection unverifiable or provably false.

Inevitably some portion of what Mr. Major knew at the time was the product of the sort of fundamentally weightless chatter forever emerging from Britain's military and diplomatic bureaucracy by institutional imperative, the sort of constantly offered muttering of what's politic to report that bubbles up to any PM's ear in confluence with any utterly certain facts on offer.


He, Major, doled out a subset of this avowedly true information ("I said less than I knew") when it came time to remark on the subject of the Gulf War, and assumed that Tony Blair, when speaking during the runup to the later invasion of Iraq, was operating under the same constraint, saying less than he knew to be true, but conforming his remarks to some urevealed verifiable something or other, not publicly contradicting that withheld yet verifiable something, or affirming some something that could not be found anywhere at all among the said and unsaid facts of the matter.

Mr. Blair's public statements surfed along on a forceful wave of potentially false but for the moment unprovably false rhetoric, stealing along on the imaginary axis bound by the magnitude of the existential threat posed to, e.g., oh, let's say Cyprus, by an arsenal of inexistent, potent chemical and biological and intercontinental weapons of destruction said to belong to evil Sadaam Hussein by Mr. Blair.

Mr. Blair willingly suggested many many things during the runup to the invasion of Iraq based on facts not in evidence, which, had they been true facts, rather than false suppositions, might have been used plausibly enough to justify the increasing militancy of his rhetoric, but which, being only potentially verifiably true or false as he spoke of them (and in the event proven thoroughly false), did nothing to advance the argument that it was ever truly a good idea to invade Iraq, however much his words advanced the actual invasion itself, which of course was the admitted reason for his rhetoric in the first place.

I'm pretty sure Mr. Major's statements, however circumspect at the time, were all in for the Gulf War. Functionally, they served precisely the same end as Mr. Blair's; each committed Britain to enlist in a major Middle Eastern military action being shopped by the US, delivering Britain's congenitally far-flung military into action when time came to war in the gulf or invade Iraq with that same famous verve, professionalism and alacrity recognized as hallmarks of British military adventurism down the ages.

Heavy Weather

National Weather Service Alert For Santa Cruz County, 2p.m. Jan. 20, 2010: 

TORNADO WARNING:

"IF NO SHELTER IS AVAILABLE...LIE FLAT IN THE NEAREST DITCH OR OTHER LOW SPOT AND COVER YOUR HEAD WITH YOUR HANDS."

I was planning on doing that anyhow after the Mass. Senate result.

Hot Stove

A few years years ago the members of a House Periodic Committee on High Dudgeon chaired by Tom Davis (R-Va.) called ballplayers and executives of Major League Baseball before it to go over all the accumulating evidence that ballplayers had been for some time freely conditioning themselves for the season-long rigors of baseball at the highest level with really sophisticated chemical concoctions, concoctions whose dissemination, for their recognized ill effects, had long been legally constrained by hopeful laws strictly regulating their handling, laws passed by that very house of congress!

!

In 1993, twelve years before Rep. Davis gavelled his hearing to order, the FBI had rounded up a bunch of people around the country who were in fact freely distributing these supposedly restricted chemicals to athletes of all kinds, and found looking into the thing that professional ballplayers at all levels were regular customers. The FBI gathered baseball names named by nabbed distributors. Mark McGwire's name was one of those names named, of course. In his appearance before Davis's committee twelve years later, McGwire curtly elided his past, relying on what must be the celebrated ballplayer's constitutional right when called before Congress to insist on talking about something else instead.

"I'm not here to talk about that, Congressman."

"[sputter] Yes you are!"

"No, I'm not here to talk about the past."

"You are too!"

"Nope."

"[Chair, dryly] The gentleman's time has expired…"

McGwire's absurd yet effective tactic kept him from having to say anything, true or not, about what he'd been up to without explictly taking the Fifth Amendment or perjuring himself right there in public. The tactic's effectiveness was restricted almost completely to the confines of the committee room, however. Outside, McGwire's performance before the committee was roundly ridiculed, and whatever fondness for the man may have lingered from the storied 1998 season when he and Sammy Sosa chased and then surpassed Babe Ruth's and then Roger Maris's single season home run record, curdled quickly following his appearance.

The realization that the grand celebrated chase of the two of them had been fueled by exactly those chemicals that were now the focus of the high dudgeon of the subcommittee brought a sneer to the lip of even the most circumspect follower of the game.

In 1993, at the time of the FBI crackdown, there were no workplace rules in place in Major League Baseball banning these newest concoctions, and Mark McGwire was one of any number of ballplayers known to be evangelizing for some remarkably effective chemical or other. The one he long championed was nicknamed "andro," (a substance unbanned even as late as 1998) which McGwire couldn't stop going on about at the time.

Belatedly perhaps, in angling for a job as hitting instructor with the St. Louis Cardinals ballclub (managed by Tony La Russa, whose continuing role in enabling McGwire's career in both Oakland and St. Louis is well understood), McGwire, perhaps as a condition prior to employment insisted on by La Russa himself, admitted publicly to doing what he had previously only been known to espouse publicly. He too had used the proscribed stuff himself, he said, straightforwardly enough.

Say in public as much of the uncomfortable truth as you can bear. This is the first step in the Rehabilitative Move of the Fallen Celebrity, which practiced motion we've all had chance to witness countless times. Mark McGwire fessed up to as much as he could in step one. However, when pressed on the question of exactly how much of the stupendous length of each of those remarkably many home runs he'd hit had been obtained as a direct result of a forbidden regimen of performance enhancing drugs, McGwire concluded that none of that length had been so affected, that the performance enhancing drugs he'd long espoused and used were false drugs in that respect, at least far as actual performance goes. As a counterargument to McGwire it is maintained by almost everybody else that performance enhancing drugs do too enhance performance. It remains to be seen whether those supporting this argument bother to press the point with McGwire, whose visit to hitting instructor purgatory in St. Louis may yet otherwise help serve to cleanse his self-stained name.

Werner on George

On the uncredited claim of the wangus from Wikipedia

The name of this fortress was derived from the Gothic word "wangus" and describes cutting down trees in an acorn forest.[citation needed]

Claiming the wangus capable of cutting down an oak is one of the oldest tropes of civil discourse. Sure it must have traveled to the Baltic ear frequently enough back in the times, this sort of boast, whether pronounced concisely "wangus" or gone on about at such greater length as might be deemed suitable to the characteristic path of just that sort of talk when engrossed in the occasion which requires it.

[There's no citation for the word wangus in the given dictionary around here, bedraggled bearer of the burden of  the 200,000  or so words most commonly taken to be English back when it was first bound — a large, somewhat dated sample of the language, in other words: hardly the whole of it by now. There's just no citeable basis for talk of wangus there. That will have to come from somewhere else: the actually rather than potentially self-correcting part of the internet, justifying what in other respects is the very model of the marvelous sentence from Wikipedia. This is not to say that I don't see the utility of Goths or anyone else forbidding the arbitrary logging of oaks in their area in an effort to preserve the bounty of freely available acorns, and can easily imagine a history in which a whole bunch of sloganeering to that effect boiled down to shouting "wangus" across the political divide.]

The Dictionary in Repose

Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 2010.

Winter Hits Santa Cruz

Twenty-Ten

Implacably reliable sources reveal that the new year is to be referred to as Twenty Ten, not Two Thousand Ten or Two Thousand and Ten, as some might have it. It's not too early to fall in with the crowd on this, is what I'm saying.

I want a New Year Just Like The Old Year That Marred My Dear Old Dad

Merry Christmas

Waits

 

Spacious Thoughts from Anti Records on Vimeo.

 

Great Moments in Baseball

Farewell to Geocities

 
Geocities shuts down today, and xkcd offers an homage.
 

Postponed

A Blast From the Past

Twenty years ago today my friend Steve and I went to the second game of the '89 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. We sat in the right field bleachers, where we had a great view of a guinea fowl being tossed from the stands at Candy Maldonado as he chased down Dave Parker's wicked line drive in the corner. Then a walk to Dave Henderson, and I remember sitting down, almost falling over backwards like a puppet with cut strings, as everyone around me rose to cheer Terry Steinbach's home run leaving the park.

Mike Moore was on that day. What can I say? The Giants hitters were no match for him. The A's brought in Honeycutt and Eckersley to finish off in the ninth. Four hits for the Giants, and I left the park gloomy. Steve didn't rub it in. Too much. A's up two games, Giants not looking very competitive.

We drove back to Santa Cruz, wondering what fate might bring.

First Annual Nobel WTF?! Prize Awarded

I suppose if the Norwoogians can award their Peace Prize to renowned war criminal Henry Kissinger, they can award it to anydamnbody they chose, including a fellow whose chief recommendation is that he is not George Bush. Of course, with two wars of his own going on, it behooves our President to think hard about what he's going to say in his acceptance speech. He's got some 'splainin' to do, for sure.
 

Cassidy

 

 

September 1, 1939

 
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

–W.H. Auden
 

He's gone, and nothin's gonna bring him back (Fourteenth Anniversary Edition)

 

 

Beat don't quit

Babe Ruth corked his bat?!!*

 
A thoughtful and thought-provoking argument(pdf) by Bill James on baseball's Hall of Fame and performance enhancing drugs.

*Yep.